1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for secured access to data in a network of the type that includes an information center and at least one data area access system (a device which provides storage space (data area) and permits access to stored data).
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the near future, “networks of practices” will be developed for different interest groups of a public or private nature (e.g., in health care, sickness insurance agencies, the health ministry and medical associations). The basic idea of these networks of practices is that, on the basis of better communication between different doctors' practices and/or hospitals, the number of often-redundant medical examinations currently carried out may be reduced. As an example, it would not be necessary to produce a further X-ray image of a lung of a patient if renewed diagnosis (e.g., by a different doctor) were possible with the assistance of an easily accessible, recently taken X-ray image of the patient's lung. It is in the public interest and that of insurance companies to reduce health costs. For this reason, the latter, in particular, would like to set up autonomous medical networks with the aid of which a patient's different doctors can access data already prepared by their colleagues to thus provide the patient with better and more cost-effective medical care.
In established test models, the main problem is that of ensuring secure communication. There are different known ways of connecting a doctor to medical units, mainly restricted to a certain group of doctors (e.g., radiologists), with a restriction to a specific type of information/data, for example X-ray plates, being prescribed.
Some national and international standards that define the way in which medical data are generated and transmitted already exist (e.g., DICOM for X-ray plates, BDT for the data of a patient, GDT for medical data generated by medical equipment such as an electrocardiograph or other devices). No special requirements have to be met in these cases with regard to the secured transmission of medical data as this is no longer a problem today on account of various known encryption mechanisms.
One particular task in the transmission of medical data is to safeguard the rights to personal privacy of the patient. Currently, the transmission of medical information is always illegal whenever it is not restricted to a closed medical group such as a hospital or a doctor's practice. To describe a network of practices with hundreds of different practices and hospitals as a closed group would probably have to be interpreted in the legal sense as an evasion of the patient's personal rights. In this case, a patient would have no possibility of knowing all the members of the group and could scarcely make use of his right to select a different group (e.g., a different hospital).